good ideas

National Review’s John Derbyshire Lectures Black Law Students About Their Inferiority

HA, best story of the year, right here. (Maybe.) The National Review‘s John “Salad Days” Derbyshire, whose opinions closely resemble what his name suggests his opinions might be, recently delivered a lecture to the Black Law Students’ Association of the UPenn Law School about old-timey racial theory, and how he completely believes it. What is wrong with him? Perhaps he was trying to get the brutes all worked up, to prove his point?

Oh man:

Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.

Now, the empirical grounds. We all notice the different physical specialties of the different races in the Olympic Games. There was a run of, I think, seven Olympics in which every one of the finalists in the men’s 100 meters sprint was of West African ancestry — 56 out of 56 finalists. You get less pronounced but similar patterns in other sports — East African distance runners, Northeast Asian divers, and so on. These differences even show up within sports, where a team sport calls for highly differentiated abilities in team members — football being the obvious example.

Game, set, match.

We see the same differences in traits that we don’t think of as directly physical, what evolutionary psychologists sometimes refer to as the “BIP” traits — behavior, intelligence, and personality. Two of the hardest-to-ignore manifestations here are the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans, and the persistent gaps in scores when tests of cognitive ability are given to large population samples.

Ha ha, gaps in “criminality” are because of Africa. No real-world factors, like discrimination and oppression. Just Africa. It’s science, and math!

He ends with a little “cheer up, we’re all good at different things you guys!!!!” pep talk after his remarkably racist, 19th-century rant to the black Ivy League lawyers association. Were any operatives there? Did you beat him up with your superior Africa-Hands?

UPDATE: Oh jesus christ… Derb himself wrote a description last week, where he whines for many paragraphs about how the moderator wasn’t fair to him and his fellow racist. DOES SHE KNOW WHAT “MODERATOR” MEANS?

Jim Newell is Wonkette's beloved Capitol Hill Typing Demon. He joined Wonkette.com in 2007, left for some other dumb job in 2010, and proudly returned in 2012 as our "Senior Editor at Large." He lives in Washington and also writes for things such as The Guardian, the Manchester paper of liberals.

How did this guy end up presenting to this group? Was his name drawn from a hat? Is there an ongoing contest of mismatching presenters to audiences? Did he sneak in under the pretense of being someone else?

4tehlulz

The fact that he managed to walk out of that room unharmed proves that African Americans are more civilized than White Americans.

ManchuCandidate

Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek, approve!!

Minnie Mean

Clearly, evolution has not been kind to Lord Derbyshireshitsack.

chascates

But can he measure the nose and brows to prove his theories? Do the Irish really sell their children for potatoes or whiskey? Are the Slavs actually subhuman as Hitler declared?

PineyWoodster

I’m willing to bet that Derbyshire has a small penis.

Dreamer

The conservatives, bless their hearts, are still in the 18th century thinking. How does any credible person or institution take the National Review seriously?

marley

The best part about this is that this theory was one of two competing theories anthropologists were considering 10 years ago, and has since been proven by “evidence” to be the wrong one.

There was immoral “mixing” going on the whole time.

Ablington

Northeast Asian divers? Makes sense, since that branch of humanity spent a mini Ice Age under water, iirc.

nappyduggs

“Did you beat him up with your superior Africa-Hands?”

Nah, but in accordance with our larcenous nature, we paid him with a a bad check, then met him in the parking lot to steal his wallet with the bad check inside of it. Then my brother went to his crib, boned his ol’ lady.

This tool said that to a room full of African Americans? He may be an unbelievable, hateful racist, but he’s got trucknutz of steel.

Troubledog

A stone ground cracker from NatRev, preaching eugenics to Ivy-league blacks with JDs?

Holy shit. It’s the end times. Somebody find Kirk Cameron.

charlesdegoal

Don’t even know where to start. Northeast Asians are good divers. Right. For genetic reasons. Is this Mr. Derbyshire good at cricket and snookers, as his name would seem to indicate?

4tehlulz

I personally suspect that someone else wrote this speech; there are no mentions of Lolitas, which is the Derb’s primary obsession

TubeCity

In the early twentieth century, descendants of West Africans did not win anything in the Olympic sprints. This proves that genetic superiority can be achieved in just a few generations, in mere decades! Those West Africans probably stole the genes, given their criminality…

Oh, they didn’t compete then? Proves my point!

hiphophitler

The best golfers are 1/4 Chinese. 1/4 Thai, 1/4 African, 1/8 Native American, and 1/8 Caucasian. Unfortunately they also fuck everything in a skirt.

bago

What year did NR start standing athwart history again?

tunamelt

He looks like a mouth breather. Is that an evolutionary trait also?

Lascauxcaveman

Wow. Condescending and yet incredibly insulting. When some pissed off Northeastern Asian diver (or West African, sprinting away from a liquor store robbery, no doubt; ’tis pre-ordained by racial qualities, you see) puts a cap in his ass someday, I doubt he’ll be missed much.

Mild Midwesterner

Why didn’t Wonkette cover his speech at the Stern School of Business, “Jews and the Banker Gene”?

freakishlystrong

My ten-minute address consisted of (a) five minutes of unfiltered race realism, right between the eyes, followed by (b) a plea to turn to good old American individualism and stop obsessing about group outcomes. This was followed by a sort of stunned silence,

From his whiny description indeed…I’m surprised the BLSA in attendance didn’t smack him with their superior dicks right between the eyes.

Does the pencil necked pot bellied micropenis also believe that the “greater upper body strength of the male” disqualifies women from any occupation more physically onerous than washing the dishes?

Rasvar

So does this prove Evolution to the right and now we can use this to tell them that Creationism is bunk and watch their heads spin?

SayItWithWookies

Wow. Why this Derbyshire asshole became a hack racist conservative bootlicker instead of following his true calling as a hack racist conservative population geneticist is a great mystery. Another great mystery is why his corpse isn’t hanging from a tree in Pennsylvania — maybe it’s because the nature of the BIP traits of Africans has led them towards a temperament of more civility and restraint than, say, white racist f*ckheads.

Zadig

[re=553824]Extemporanus[/re]: Given what he said and who he said it to, he apparently has Testicular Elephantitis as well.

The apartheid regime had a number of pseudo scientific tests for classifying people as belonging to one of four main groups: White, Black, Indian, Coloured (mixed race). One of these tests involved putting a comb through hair – if it got stuck, that meant the person being tested was identified as African.

Brits like this have been saying this same crap about Irish Catholics for centuries. Only difference is that the Irish wouldn’t have let him get out of there alive.

AxmxZ

Oh, we’re going by measurable gaps in cognitive ability now? Fabulous. I hope Derbyshire has his biometric papers in order, – there’s bound to be at least one charitable Jew or East Asian willing to buy him, for spare parts if no other reason.

betterDeadThanRed

Just better divers? He didn’t even mention about how Asians are better at science and math than any of us white folk.

NYNYNY

Go back to Sussex and eat crumpets you English douche-hat!

Aurelio

Penn has a hate speech policy, but as long as you don’t call black people “water buffaloes,” you’re OK.

queeraselvis v 2.0

Unlike John Derbyshire, I shall not expound at great gassy length about his obviously fervent desire to have a large black penis inserted repeatedly up his rectum.

Gorillionaire

He should present at the BET Awards.

snideinplainsight

Also, I’d just like to ask what kind of diving he’s talking about here, for the record. Because I’m just a caulk-asian, and I’m pretty proud of my innate diving skills, if you know what I mean –

NYNYNY

[re=553791]Troubledog[/re]: Somebody find Kirk Cameron.

Uh…Kirk just zoomed up into the sky like a fucking rocket. Is that bad?

PsycGirl

[re=553786]nappyduggs[/re]: Then my brother went to his crib, boned his ol’ lady.
and thus he earned her undying gratitude.

Tommmcatt

Did anybody make a “Toss My Salad Days” joke yet?

norbizness

“They’re animals anyway… let them get their law degrees.”

In any event, many of his racial theories were formulated after getting his ass kicked by noted Asian Bruce Lee. Which is to say, a mammoth concussion from which he’s never recovered (judging from the picture in the post).

norbizness

Derbyshire also accused his debate opponent of having the brainpain of a stagecoach-tilter.

Look, you guys don’t understand. John Derbyshire is a scientific genius. He’s such a genius that he managed to invent a time machine and travel all the way to the 21st century. His race theories are cutting edge science… it’s just that they’re cutting edge from the time he came from – the 19th century.

UnattendedConsequence

His between the eyes racist realism is totally bullshit! Everyone knows that the asians are definitely NOT good drivers.

Mr Blifil

Isn’t the story that they invited him sort of to be cute, and he resisted the invitation, and then took them up on it for the opportunity to rub his feces in their faces? All of which would be fine. Unfortunately if he’s now complaining about being perceived as a racist douchebag, then he is worthy of nothing better than to be dressed in a seersucker suit and dropped off in Darkietown after nightfall with no money for cab fare home.

PerhapsSo

[re=553780]chascates[/re]: For Jameson, yeah, you could probably have my (nonexistent) kids.

On topic, but not snarky – The Economist has an excellent article up now with data showing that mass incarceration of black men (aka the “war on drugs”) is in large part responsible for the collapse of the black family in the US.

Apologies, I can’t think of anything funny to say after reading Derbyshire. That man should choke on a dick.

imissopus

The argument of the book, very briefly, is that what can be done in law, politics, and social engineering to make amends for slavery and Jim Crow has been done, and the rest is up to African Americans themselves.

I would argue that another major requirement, perhaps the biggest of all, is that people like Derbyshire need to accept that all the laws and social engineering in the world will not overcome the stubborn prejudices of people like himself who seem unable to recognize that while Jim Crow and slavery may be a thing of the past, the psychological wounds inflicted by centuries of racism and oppression have not come close to healing. That if African-Americans are struggling it is NOT acceptable to simply say that they need to try harder, but that whites still have built-in prejudices that will be a barrier for as long as they exist (the prejudices I mean, not the people.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that as long as people born with certain advantages behave like douchebags, those who come into the world in more disadvantages circumstances will continue to struggle no matter what laws we enact to help them out.

Rant over, return to snarking.

Disinterested

I’m gonna get all real-sciencey for a second here, just because this bullshit is so easily refutable it defies reason that it would be presented in an academic forum. First, to give Johnny some credit, there are differences between the groups of people we call races. Unfortunately for him, those differences tend to be entirely self-referential. Black people are black people because, well, they *look* like black people. If they looked like white people, then they’d be white people! As far as other “innate” differences between races, they simply don’t exist in aggregate. There’s just as much genetic variation between two randomly chosen strangers from one “race” as between anyone else. Derbyshire is a racist, pure and fucking simple. He doesn’t know anything about sexual selection, genetics, or apparently even statistics.

imissopus

[re=553883]thesheriffisnear[/re]: Aw, I’m blushing.

Pop Socket

Just wow. He makes Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby sound like the president of the NAACP.

thesheriffisnear

[re=553891]Barry White Zombie[/re]: Of course, Black men with recreational drugs provide the low-hanging fruit that help maintain the stats that justify bloated police budgets at a time when municipalities and states are looking for ways to cut expenditure. The whole security, police and corrections industrial complex is predicated on keeping a flow of bodies into the system.
And I can say that because I’m, uh, a sheriff.

This is my favorite article and it got relatively little play. Must’ve struck a nerve.

Wait! He forget to mention the thing that people of European ancestry are better at than any other race in history, ever: genocide!

give us a bob

It’s amazing what televised sports coverage has done for anthropologists these days.

Used to be, you had to measure bone structure of thousands of individuals, alive or dead, to get a sample large enough to reliably make generalizations about the physiological characteristics of a particular race.

Now, just watch a few seasons of the Olympics (who participants are all of average build and fitness, of course) and viola! “Those Africans sure do run fast, so it must be trait.”

Much easier!

I-man

Glad that I’m not in Law school yet. And I am severely disappointed in my fellow blacks. Don’t they teach choking out racist retards anymore? Derbyshire sure is right, no? Devastate and plunder a continent and people for half a millenia and then wonder why they aren’t assholes like you 50 years after people like you stopped raping them.

thesheriffisnear

[re=553908]Disinterested[/re]: Good points. The fact is Racist is the most missused word in the language. We use the term racist interchangeably with bigot. Racism features the introduction of pseudo-scientific “facts” to support unsupportable conclusions. Most teabaggers are bigots, Himmler was a Racist and Derbyshire, most definitely, is a racist.

bitchincamaro

Cretinous. Scat spewing. Midget.

mcc

Anybody remember back when we used to single Derbyshire out for praise because he was one of the only conservative intellectuals we could get to go on the record as believing in the theory of evolution?

[re=553795]TubeCity[/re]: Don’t forget the way that Chinese, Korean and Japanese divers ruled the Olympic natatorium since…well since 1996.

Those northeast Asians really evolve fast.

Aurelio

One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split….

I think his point is that the energetic people with individual initiative and get-up-and-go left Africa and became Asians and white people. The ones that stayed behind did so because they were lazy good-for-nothings, which is why we used to have to beat them with a whip to get them to pick cotton on the plantation back in the good old days.

sfstewart

What a dillweed. But as my mother always said, Opinions are like assholes. Unless their your own, they really really stink.

NotthatLC

I assume that the reason that he was able to get out of the room alive was that everyone was in too much shock to stop him. I myself, would have assumed he was joking. At one point, I probably would have started laughing out loud during his lecture because…he’s joking, right?

I don’t know what you can do with these people. Standing in a room with a bunch of black ivy league law students would seem to disprove the point he was (jokingly??) trying to make, but one can do nothing with these people. Once they start putting Hitler mustaches on our black president, it truly is time to find something better to do.

nappyduggs

[re=553815]Egregious[/re]:

I will celebrate your endorsement by taking a couple of laxatives and wiping my black ass with a copy of “The Bell Curve.”

Cheers.

Pat Pending

Let us give both this man and Henry Louis Gates Jr a beer and a banjo, and then record the results.

legalize everything

[re=553836]TGY[/re]: of course, his mom insists that he wear his helmet anytime he leaves the house.

Pandy

[re=553790]freakishlystrong[/re]: Nah, he just has an unreasonably large ego and that’s about all.

CommitteeOfTheHole

Northeast Asians are the best drivers!? Christ. Not that I’ve noticed. In my experience, those guys can barely stay in their lanes … oh … DIVERS. I got it. Nevermind.

WonderWomyn

He’s not a mathematician people! He just writes popular books about mathematics. As Radical BLACK Womyn who’s also a grad student in math I really resent having this douche-bag called a mathematician, that’s a tile he hasn’t earned. All he’s ever done is regurgitate simple concepts about prime numbers for the masses in a popular math book my undergrads could write. He’s no mathematician. His failure to be one probably is the source of his intellectual inferiority complex.

Joe the Plumber

Is he helping with the new educational standard for the State of Texas? I am sure they will want to put this into the new “science” texts.

Way Cool Larry

[re=553908]Disinterested[/re]: well stated!

and… basically what everyone else here said.

awesomeguy#1

Jimmy the Greek?

liquiddaddy

This guy has teen-age children? Really?

canadasteve

Sixty thousand years ago? Excuse me? Every good, god-lovin’, commie-hatin’, Republican’t knows we were created SIX THOUSAND years ago in Jeebus’ image in a garden in Arabia, or Baghdad, or Baltimore.

Lascauxcaveman

[re=553958]NotthatLC[/re]: Either that, or the profs who set up this little display made it an exercise in maintaining your professional cool while litigating.

“Pretend this well-known sexist, racist douchesack is an assistant DA trying to force you into an unseemly outburst in court, thereby losing sympathy with the mostly-white jury. What reaction, if any, best supports your winning your case?”

Lascauxcaveman

[re=554151]Lascauxcaveman[/re]: Or possibly the law students were all just napping. When I was in college, the best place to catch 40 winks was in the back rows of some lecture you know isn’t gonna be on the test.

Smoke Filled Roommate

Did he expect a ‘thank you’ from these people?

TheWaltonFirm

It’s too bad Derbyshire couldnt be more like Truck Nutz and be beyond race.

K.C.

I wonder if his Asian wife(i.e., mail-order bride) was in the audience?

slinkimalinki

[re=554221]K.C.[/re]: She was busy diving.

Redhead

So what you’re saying is, this Derbyshire guy is suicidal.

He should go to Nebraska. I hear if you say you’re brewing a baby, you get a free mental health screening…

Numbat Dundee

Of course criminality is hereditary. I’m Australian by the way and I just palmed your wallet. Ahh the convict stain!

zhubajie

I’m sure his audience has heard it all before. :-(

zhubajie

[re=553790]freakishlystrong[/re]: No, he’s just stupid.

zhubajie

Back in the days when physical anthropologists took this crap seriously (60-70 years ago) and thought there might be real human sub-species or pure breeds, they could never agree on how many race there were or how to distinguish them. Were there 3-4 races? or 30-40? It was all subjective. Since then, they (we) have been tracing distribution of individual traits, things that can actually be measured, like blood group distribution, distribution of flaky ear-wax, vs. sticky ear-wax, distribution of skull shapes, etc. Guess what? They don’t add up into sub-species or breeds! You can’t count on people who have (say) flaky type ear-wax always having same proportions of A, B, AB and O blood groups! Or always being brachycephalic! Same-same for any other real physical traits. People look different from each other, but no more so than mongrel puppies in the same litter. We always interbreed, no problem, and that’s the definition of a species.

Derbyshire is like any kook theorist: first he picks up on some idea he likes, then he looks around for factoids that sort of fit with it. He never considers what evidence would persuade him he’s wrong (the Popper Principle).

Zadig

[re=554348]zhubajie[/re]: Today, we are all mutts.

Zadig

[re=554348]zhubajie[/re]: Seriously, he is looking for new things to be racist about. “You know, half-Jewish half-Asian dudes make literally the worst Jiffy Lube attendants.”

zhubajie

Unfortunately, lots of hard scientists fall for big-lies involving the humanities or soft sciences. A large share of young earth creationists have MAs in physics and the like. Derbyshire’s expertise in math gives him ZERO expertise on subjects like race, physical anthropology, etc. Probably he hasn’t bothered to define race in his own mind, just take the socially-constructed flattery and BS he was raised with for granted.

WonderWomyn

[re=554365]zhubajie[/re]: See my comment above. He’s not really a mathematician. He just writes popular math books. That means he knows more math than 95% of the population, but STILL. There’s a big fraken’ difference! You are right, though about people in analytic science becoming stupid when they talk about the humanities. We have a tendency to underestimate the complexity of things since in the hard sciences everything is very simple and unambiguous.

I’m just depressed he’s another racist white guy who is *supposed* to be an ambassador for math to the world…and looks at all of the little black kids and thinks they can’t make it. You know that crap’s a self fulling prophecy. :(

I’ll just have to give them that much more attention to make up for jack-holes like him and the rest. GODDAMMIT.

ShortShadey

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Sarah Palin’s chief science advisor.

zhubajie

Did he mention that the reason a whole lot of his neo-con pals are not in jail or hanging from a gallows is that white folks let each other off?

Zhu Bajie

ringed

Snarky comments aside, I think we shouldn’t readily dismiss Amy Wax’s conclusions. Regardless of whether Amy Wax is a racist, she has provided the African-American community with important insight as to how dominant culture perceives us. The views of Derbyshire and Wax are not isolated. Overtly, but more often behind closed doors, members of dominant society have indicated that they do not feel compelled to redress racial and social stratification. I think it is an important revelation. If they do not feel an alignment with the black community, due to biological theories or perceived self-inflicted dissidence, then we cannot expect solutions from external sources. So, I agree with Amy Wax that many of the solutions will have to come from within the African-American community itself.

As for Derbyshire, eugenics and scientific racism are merely repackaged forms of ariosophy, theosophy and other variations of ethnic mysticism. I think the “right in between the eyes realism” concerned Amy Wax’s comments, which boil down to: we’re not helping you, so do it yourself. It’s a quite telling stance.

Someday, if this man is ever unfortunate enough to make it into a nursing home, his black nurse will change his adult diapers, daily, for 364 days. On the 365 day, he or she will come out of his or her trance, take the soiled diaper, and smother him with it and his own waste. Thus will be the deserved end of an undeserving bigot.

zhubajie

Did Derbyshire get paid for this nonsense?

Do his fellow National-Review-niks agree?

Does Derbyshire have a black hooker or a black child somewhere to embarrass him? Maybe a black aunt or uncle, like Warren G. Harding?

zhubajie

[re=554387]ShortShadey[/re]: Would she hire someone who believes in evolution? The best thing about all these nutburgers is that they don’t co-operate with each other.

saggyboobedhag

[re=553772]PsycGirl[/re]:

Is there an ongoing contest of mismatching presenters to audiences?

Let’s start one!

zhubajie

What is it with all these Limeys like Derbyshire and Hitchens and Sullivan coming to the US to lecture us on our politics and society? Do they have anything to offer besides their accents? Derb in particular sounds like a right prat, as they say.

CthuNHu

[re=553837]user-of-owls[/re]: Huh. Apparently I was African as a child.

bbqboy

[re=553796]hiphophitler[/re]:
That mix is also a superior Polo formula, with the added bonus of horses.

iolanthe

[re=554414]LowerdPeninsula[/re]: My Dad lived (and died) in a top-of-the-line nursing home here in California a few years back. Most of the folks staying there were upper-middle-class whites, born sometime between 1905 and 1920. All of the workers were brown or black. The guests tended to throw around the most horrifying racial pejoratives, since that had been “cool speech” … and perfectly normal and OK … when they were young.

My Dad was a child of his times and used a few of those terms, too. But he was also, overall, a decent guy, who was grateful when the staff helped him, who tried to remember their names (even through his dementia), who would joke with them, who avoided the most insulting racial language.

Others of his agemates could *not* say anything to the staff without insulting them, accusing them of stealing, etc. etc.

You’re right. The worst offenders, the ones that liked to say “spic” and “n***er”, were left in the hallway at the far end all day, to marinate in their own filthy diapers, whereas the old folks who were polite got to go for walks (or were wheeled) to get ice cream. ;-> And who can blame the staff?

Gayer Than Thou

It all makes sense to me. After all, it is well-documented that teh gays are genetically better at interior decorating, hair dressing and, to cite the Olympics (it’s more authoritative than Wikipedia!), we’re also far, far better at skating around on ice in sequins. I would explain why that should be so, in evolutionary terms, but I suspect some of you have BIP factors that would make it hard for you to understand.

ThisIsNotAnAvatar

Derbyshire is married and has two children. They get no say in what he says.

kudzu

He’s just upset that he can’t get a well-hung black boyfriend, that’s all.

President Beeblebrox

For once I am left without snark.

Der Gletscher

Oh, boy. If his theory is right it would mean that the only thing his race (whity white whites) is good at is to discriminate, to hate and to look down on others. This dude is so off that he probably realizes from time to time how damaged he is. Being stuck thinking in such categories is seriously sad. Some people spit venom when ever they open their mouth, and you can always tell b/c those people never accomplish greater things in their lives. They always waste so much energy on talking bad about others, finding any excuse to badmouth that there is none left for them to reach real goals in life that everybody could benefit from. Can’t take em serious, even thou their illnesses are.